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Show "The Woman's Touch" How many times have you heard, "Sure, go ahead and blow your top. It's good for you. Too many people keep it pent up inside -hard on the nerves. " This is the folklore of generations. gene-rations. But medical scientists today have a totally different answ er. They say that getting mad can bring on or aggravate: heart disease, high blood pressure, pres-sure, colitis, ulcers, head colds, asthma, chronic indigestion, headaches, dizziness, jaundice, skin disorders, poor vision, and fainting spells. Get a person to think about his troubles, and his temperatures tempera-tures may rise from 1 12 to 2 12 degrees. But far worse things happen when you "fly off the handle. " ' The fact is, though, you don't get it out of your system. Anger is a poison. Once in your system, adrenalin has to be absorbed. Too much of it, and you have a peptic ulcer. Each time we get mad makes it easier to do it again. That's the insidious part of losing los-ing our temper. It quickly gets to be a habit, Anger can hit you anywhere, any-where, blur the vision, cause permanent damage to the retina. re-tina. Chronic seething anger can stop up the flow of bile and back it up into the blood vessels; you wind up with Jaundice. Anger can even kill you via heart failure or stroke, by increasing blood pressure to where vessel walls give away in the brain, heart or kidneys. It all boils down to this: A firey temper is downright dangerous. dan-gerous. Have you ever accomplished accom-plished more because you blew your top? But isn't anger a natural thing? It is. But there's a difference dif-ference between a flush of justifiable justi-fiable anger and constant hostility. hos-tility. The cure? We're born with a temper and we're stuck with it. So first, admit your feelings feel-ings Right or wrong, you're going to get mad at a certain number of people in your life- ! time. Now you can get rid of your anger by punching the person who caused it, or by telling him off. That's the animal's way-fighting way-fighting and snarling. We have anger because we are animals; we try to hide it because we are human. Aristotle knew the cure for anger, four centuries before Christ. He wrote, "The brain is a cooling system to keep the heart from overheating. " So build a straw man and take your anger out on him. Go rip weeds out of your garden. Tear down an old shed. Clean out the shop. Cut brush. Paint. Take a walk. Anything that takes real energy. If social injustice makes you mad, do something to correct it. But under no circumstances take it- out on the car. That's where bodies get crushed. One woman I know goes shopping-for hats, and winds up laughing at her sour face in the mirror. Dinah Shore writes her anger in a letter, then burns it. The point is, devise a substitute substi-tute for inner seething. You can learn to curb your temper, faster than you know. And if you're already an easygoing easy-going person who never gets mad at anybody, thank your lucky stai You might be more interesting" if you get mad more, but you'd have fewer friends and you might be dead too. ' |